Several years ago, Netflix changed one small feature in its streaming interface in the name of collecting feedback from its millions of customers. Instead of letting its users rate shows and movies from one to five stars, the streaming giant shifted to asking them to give a simple thumbs up or thumbs down.
This small change in customer feedback strategy increased engagement with the feature by 200%, giving the company valuable insights into its subscribers’ preferences and allowing it to better tailor its offerings to users on a personalized, case-by-case basis.
Smart customer feedback like this can help change the trajectory of a business. Here are methods and tips for gathering detailed feedback.
What is customer feedback?
Customer feedback is any and all information provided by consumers that reflects customer experience and customer satisfaction with the product or service your company offers. Feedback can come in the form of a rating system (such as a star system or numerical scale), customer surveys, customer interviews, or traditional written reviews.
Customer feedback can reveal what your business is doing well, along with what needs improvement. And it’s in your company’s best interest to utilize this feedback to elevate your customer experience to its peak level. Customers are two and a half times more likely to make additional purchases from a business after enjoying a five-star experience, compared to customers who give it one or two stars.
How to gather customer feedback
There are several ways ecommerce businesses can collect customer feedback to learn how customers feel about their products, services, or brand in general. These include:
Social media
For certain customers, social media may be the primary way they engage with your business, posting on your brand’s profile page or tagging your company when they have a question, concern, or praise. In addition, social media monitoring tools can aggregate public customer opinions about your business from various platforms, giving you another valuable stream of customer feedback.
When Marcus Milione founded his apparel and jewelry company Minted New York, he took advantage of TikTok as both a marketing tool and a customer feedback tool. On an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, Marcus highlights the importance of leveraging social media to hear directly from customers.
“There are constructive comments and criticisms that come from people that you can use to help improve your product,” Marcus says. “Binging your customer along on the journey helps them buy into the product at the end of the day even more because they are part of that entire process.”
Feedback widgets
Feedback widgets are tools that pop up on your ecommerce site during the user journey or following a purchase to ask for feedback about a customer’s experience. As they typically prompt a user for only one or two clicks, feedback widgets often have a higher response rate than more involved types of customer feedback. Shopify offers a number of feedback widgets you can embed directly into your ecommerce site.
Customer surveys
Customer feedback surveys often include multiple-choice questions designed to elicit specific, actionable insights, such as “How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend?”
Depending on how you structure it, a customer feedback survey can solicit a range of valuable information, from a general customer satisfaction score (CSAT) to a Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures customer loyalty, to a customer effort score (CES), which measures how difficult it is for consumers to receive help from a company.
Product feedback forms
Product feedback forms facilitate information gathering about why loyal customers bought your product or service, how they are using it, and how they feel about it. They are good tools to use if you want to improve both your offerings and customer experience. Questions might include “How satisfied are you with the product?” and “What feature is most important to you?”
Customer chat data
Many companies now rely on chatbots to handle initial customer service requests. These tools often have the ability to analyze conversations and create reports containing information like the total number of chats, the busiest time periods, and the most common topics. This information can inform decisions about your product development, customer service, branding, and marketing.
Review sites
As with social media, customers may use third-party review sites like Google to offer unsolicited actionable feedback regarding your business. Monitoring these external sites offers one more way to learn how consumers feel about your brand, plus an avenue for engaging with your customers. Take the time to thank happy customers who leave positive reviews. Similarly, post polite and thoughtful responses to unhappy customers who leave negative feedback. Your efforts can go a long way toward assuring your customers that you value their opinions and are working hard to address any shortcomings.
What is a customer feedback loop?
A customer feedback loop is the process through which a business receives customer feedback and then responds to that feedback, engaging with consumers and creating a virtuous cycle that helps improve the company, the product or service, and the consumer experience.
One model your business can put in place to help kickstart a customer feedback loop is known as ACAF, which stands for:
- Ask
- Categorize
- Act
- Follow-up
First, your business asks for feedback (A). Then it categorizes that feedback (C) and acts on the feedback (A). Finally, it follows up on the feedback (F). These four steps offer a structure you can build upon when beginning your customer feedback journey.
3 tips for collecting customer feedback
Here are a few tips you can use to better collect customer feedback and ensure a high-quality customer journey:
Ask the right questions
Your ability to learn anything useful from your customers is directly related to the quality and type of questions you ask them. General queries such as “How do you feel about our company?” can be helpful for improving marketing efforts. More specific questions like “What additional features would you like to see in this product?” are useful for product development.
Including both quantitative feedback questions (ratings on a scale) and qualitative feedback questions (asking customers how they feel) allows you to elicit a variety of responses you can use in different ways.
Follow up
After customers respond to your surveys, following up is a critical step in maintaining these customer feedback loops. Sending a personalized email, text, or social media message is a great way to demonstrate that your business values a customer’s time, purchase, and opinions. It also increases your chances of creating repeat customers.
Offer incentives
With attention at a premium on the internet, sometimes customers need a good reason to spend their valuable time and effort filling out feedback forms. A discount code, product freebie, or anything else you can offer to entice them can help boost your response rate, leading to more feedback data and, ultimately, more happy customers.
Customer feedback FAQ
What is an example of good customer feedback?
Let’s say your store sells custom printing greeting cards. Sales are going well, but you want to grow your business, so you implement a post-purchase survey on your site, complete with a discount incentive, to solicit feedback from customers. In analyzing your responses, you find that your customers would like to have the option to buy packs of multiple cards instead of having to purchase them individually. You implement the change on your ecommerce site and sales increase, all thanks to consumer feedback.
Why is it important to get customer feedback?
Leveraging quantitative and qualitative customer feedback helps you to improve many elements of your business, from your products or services to your customer service, marketing, and branding. Implementing feedback tools also lets you engage with your customer base and begin a relationship with new customers.
How do you use customer feedback?
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